


Cuckoo

by gyromitra



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Doll is confused, F/F, Hunter is smitten, Open to Interpretation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:46:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28147050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gyromitra/pseuds/gyromitra
Summary: She is a cuckoo, after all, and she will suffer no hatchling but hers in the nest.
Relationships: The Hunter/Plain Doll (Bloodborne)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 28
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Cuckoo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Razia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Razia/gifts).



She must have had a name before the fog that coils around the soles of her boots in the streets of the city has twined around the sharp edges of her mind with the soft kiss of the waters that ferry away the dead to their well-deserved rest. She must have had a name other than a hunter, the one name everybody she meets calls her – a title more than a name - she knows that as firmly as she believes she might retrieve it from the traitorous depths once the morning breaks over the stone cathedrals of Yharnam.

And yet, in the small dream of dreams, where the song of the Hunt seems to simmer under the surface of reality, she does not care, not at all, not when the Doll greets her readily regardless if she comes victorious, or bloodied and humbled, and broken, and lost.

“Welcome home, good hunter.”

The hunter smiles, the small ornament gripped in her trembling hand, and steps forward, stopping only to wrest her breath under control and cow her heart into slumber, for it flutters like a maddened caged bird in her breast.

“Is something the matter, good hunter?” The Doll asks with her head bowed to the side.

“I’ve… I’ve found this.” She presents the adornment on her open palm. “And I thought it would look beautiful in your hair. If you want it. From me.”

“Oh.” The Doll raises her hand to the pin, fingers touch the polished stone, brush against the hunter’s skin, not as soft as human flesh should be, not as warm. “Can I have it? Is this feeling… joy, good hunter?”

“Here, let me.”

The hunter slowly pushes the hat away from the fair hair, ever so cautious not to tousle the delicate locks; her palm comes to rest on the Doll’s cheek, and she carefully pins the blood-red ornament, ready to step back when the Doll’s fingers cover her own.

“I’ve felt nothing like this before, good hunter.”

And, like a under a spell – a sudden bout of madness she cannot control – the hunter leans in only to be answered in kind.

*

“Your lips, they are so cold,” the hunter whispers later, her fingers splayed over the rosy cheek and tangled in the loose locks of fair hair as she inhales sharp and hurried, her eyes almost black with the bottomless human devotion sweeter than any other nectar of the vast empty universe, save for one. “I don’t mind, I don’t mind it at all,” she repeats, feverish in her prayer trance.

If only they knew, in their impermanence, when casting their eyes to the beyond, what their greatest gift was, and wouldn’t squander it on the pursuits of their finite reason bared trifling in the face of the whole of infinite existence.

The Doll, she needs no more, and yet she yearns as she sends the hunter away, again and again, enticing and coy, observing and drinking in the offerings freely given – and is it a flutter of an unfamiliar emotion that she experiences, now and then? Something borrowed. Something stolen. Something imprinted.

She is, after all, a cuckoo, a wyrm hidden lying in wait for eons, tucked away neatly into a form alien to her, folded carefully along the lines of her own perception; secreted in other’s nest, she sustains herself on its eggs. But it is the truth of form and being: they are inseparable, and to change one’s form is to change one’s being – the Doll accepts.

The hunter brings her gifts, small tokens of her faith; the Doll leaves them scattered in the garden, poisons the dream with a map of attachments of her own: a stone here, a jewel there, a comb balanced precariously on the edge of a gravestone, a ribbon tied around a branch. She is a cuckoo, after all, and she will suffer no hatchling but hers in the nest.

*

“Good hunter, you have come... Dawn will soon break... This night, and this dream, will end.” It is fear the Doll feels, a strange anxious coil burrowed deep into her being and form. The hunter clasps her hands in her own, eyes heavy with something unspoken as she shakes her head. “Gehrman awaits you, at the foot of the great tree. Go on, good hunter..."

“Even if I’m to go mad, even if I’m to be forever bound, I won’t leave you.”

The Doll kisses her.

“It is time for you, good hunter, to spread your wings, and fly.”

*

And does her hunter fly, ever so graceful, ever so beautiful, ever so powerful, ever so full of the realized potential her kind can aspire to. The little dream of the cuckoo’s nest shudders with the tremors of the eggshell cracked.

*

One day, they will shed those forms and they will leave this little dream of the childhood’s nest behind for other dreams, the Doll and her hunter – but for now, the Doll cradles the young one in her arms as the Hunter’s Dream rebuilds itself around the two nightmares and the flames douse into embers until they smolder no more. The flowers sprout from the ground and climb over the stones, smother the vines, and slink into the workshop.

“Is she…?” The old one asks.

“She is content. She remembers you fondly.” The Doll answers without raising her head and lifts the tiny tentacles towards the old one with her palm. “She wants to greet you.”

“Her name…?”

“It is here, somewhere, upon a grave.”

Eileen scoffs and stares at the fresh tombstone, the one where an all too familiar name twists carved in a forgotten script, with lanterns and flowers adorning the edges. The Messengers peek curiously from behind it.

She’s never liked the crocuses. The lilies are not that much better. She asks not after Gehrman.

“She will name herself,” the Doll chuckles. The old hunter tentatively reaches out and a small tentacle wraps around her outstretched finger, holding with the strength of a newborn. “Will you stay and keep her company?”

“Until the next Hunt.”

“Until the next Hunt,” the Doll agrees.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm hoping it's readable :) It wasn't a too easy prompt, but also very interesting :)


End file.
